Norway Faces Heroin Crisis

Addiction To The Drug Spreads, Leading To A Rise In Overdose Deaths.

December 4, 2004|By Jeffrey Fleishman, Los Angeles Times

OSLO, Norway -- She said she only smoked heroin, but there were needle bruises on her neck. She said she loved her boyfriend, but she stood on a corner and offered herself to others. She said she was a girl, but then remembered she had become a woman. She said she wanted to quit, but she knew she wouldn't.

Across town in a brick chapel, the Rev. Jon Atle Wetaas lighted three votive candles. "These are for peace and reflection," the priest said. "We never know what we'll meet out there."

Then he and a nurse loaded a camper with clean needles, medicine and coffee and drove the streets searching for some of the estimated 5,000 to 7,000 heroin addicts who shadow this Norwegian port city.

They came upon the woman on the corner, a shattered 18-year-old desperately looking to fill her empty syringe. Her name was Katrin Nygard Helgeland.

"I try to quit," she said, her face pale in the autumn half-light. "I get depressed, and I run away inside myself."

Clean and tidy Oslo, the capital of a nation with one of the highest standards of living and some of the best social programs in the world, is one of Europe's heroin havens.

Three years ago, it recorded more overdoses than any other major European city. Now, after a two-year decline in drug deaths -- in part because of the war in Afghanistan, which interrupted the production and marketing of heroin -- the number of overdoses is rising.

The trafficking routes leading to this city of stiff winds and North Sea oil money have reopened, and Norway is again a prime destination in the international drug network.

Opium smuggled out of Afghanistan and turned into heroin is ferried by Albanian and Serb gangs through Bulgaria and Romania before being distributed across Central and Northern Europe. In one raid this year, Oslo police confiscated nearly 150 pounds of heroin -- double the previous largest seizure, in 2001.

The United Nations recently announced that despite the presence of U.S. and international troops, opium cultivation in Afghanistan increased 64 percent this year, growing into a $2.8 billion business.

"There's a war in Oslo at the moment," said Ole Martin Holte, director of the medical camper program for addicts run by the Franciscan Aid agency. "There was less heroin in the streets during the Afghan conflict. Prices went up to 400-450 kroner ($66 to $74). It's down to 200 to 250 ($33 to $41), and today the heroin is purer, which leads to more overdoses."